In 2019, the Malawi Government through the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA) developed a five year Disaster Risk Financing Strategy (DRFS) to assist communities manage climate induced risks and build their own resilience towards the impacts of disasters.
Malawi is acutely prone to disasters with the most devastating impact felt in 2023 when the country was hit by Tropical Cyclone Freddy which affected 2.2 million people and about 600 deaths were recorded.
According to the Department of Economic Planning and Development, these disasters have put government on enormous liquidity challenges and a significant economic impact on infrastructure, agriculture, housing and livelihoods contributing to high persistent poverty.
Civil Society Network on Climate Change (CISONECC) organized a stakeholders’ engagement on participatory monitoring and evaluation of the DRF strategy to generate actionable recommendations for enhancing effective implementation of a successor strategy.
CISONECC’s National Coordinator Julius Ng’oma was upbeat the recommendations calling for a robust framework towards disaster risk financing would resonate with what government is trying to do through the review.
Despite this and a number of instruments suggested to be operating in Malawi to help the country better respond to natural calamities, he noted that much more needs to be done to help the poor effectively respond to disasters on the ground.
Ng’oma stated that he is yet to see people’s vulnerabilities being reduced from such kind of interventions that are being suggested within the financing strategy.
“We’re yet to see people graduating from different levels of vulnerability towards resilience and this is something that we’re trying to do today to review what has been there so far as suggested in the strategy; whether its making a difference or not.
“This is why you’ve already seen that even from the sentiments those different players that have participated in this meeting they’ve been calling for more robust kind of framework that should be able to guide us into reducing the differentiated vulnerabilities within the communities and also move towards resilience towards disaster impact”
The National Coordinator indicated that Malawi was supposed to identify a number of financing instruments in terms of moving towards resilience.
He however observed that most of the proposed instruments are usually driven by external support coming into the country to finance some of the interventions with government lagging behind.
From his assessment, the major issue has been the lack of resources within the government itself and lack of prioritisation in terms of moving resources towards disaster risk management
“Maybe government saw an opportunity that a number of external players are already allocating resources into the sector, but this needs to change as it’s the poor people that are suffering and these donors can at any point decide to move away from providing support.”
Patricia Sakala a representative from the Ministry of Finance’ Department of Debt and Aid hailed the support from development partners in DRF during the first phase of the strategy.
“When we encountered some disasters in the country like the Cyclones, the floods through the development partners we were able to help the local poor Malawians who were being affected by the floods, the cyclones.”
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